A Kindness Cup: Text Classics
Text Classics
Thea Astley
Introduction by Kate Grenville
I told them to go into the scrub and disperse the tribe.
Disperse? That is a strange word. What do you mean by dispersing?
Firing at them.
Two decades after a massacre of local Aboriginal people, the former residents of a Queensland town have reunited to celebrate the progress and prosperity of their community. Tom Dorahy, returning to his hometown, is having none of it: he wants those responsible to own up to their actions. A reckoning with oppression, guilt and the weight of the past, A Kindness Cup is one of Thea Astley’s greatest achievements.
REVIEWS
andA Kindness Cup
‘Smart, compassionate.’
‘One of the earliest and most empathetic postwar engagements by a white Australian writer with the horrors of nineteenth-century racial violence.’
‘This timely and attractively priced reissue is a welcome chance to reconsider [Astley’s] rich oeuvre. Astley’s work is characterised by her irony and unflinching scrutiny of social injustice. In A Kindness Cup, she was at the top of her impressive form…This short novel is one of Australia’s finest.’
